FIRST FICTION

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Waterloo

A Novel

Karen Olsson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 308 pp., $24

WATERLOO was once the name of Austin, Texas, and that storied capital -- at various times, home to such luminaries as Willie Nelson, the Butthole Surfers and George W. Bush -- is the barely fictionalized center of Karen Olsson’s razor-sharp first novel. The town’s contradictions, woozy inertia and fading past are all embodied in Nick Lasseter, a reporter on the alternative Waterloo Weekly, where he faces frequent bouts of “obituarist’s block.”

Nick is a well-meaning fellow whose modest flair for investigative journalism has become an albatross in a boosterish media environment, whose ex-girlfriend has traded up and whose drinking buddies reminisce ad nauseam (in true Austin fashion) about the gigs they played 10 years ago. Directionless, girlfriendless and on the verge of joblessness, Nick might even botch straight-up failure: “Lacking the guts to really hit bottom,” Olsson’s pithy narrator tells us, “he trailed slowly along through the murk like a squid or a shrimp.”

But then Nick manages to unearth an actual scoop, one involving gerrymandering, insider dealings, eminent domain and a whiff of adultery. In other words, he leaves vague nostalgia behind and wanders into modern Waterloo -- and modern America. Olsson writes for the Texas Monthly, and she knows her turf. It’s no slight to suggest that “Waterloo” -- despite its artful plotting, caustic humor and panoramic cast -- is a crackerjack civics lesson. As lovable a loser as Nick is, what this tale is really about is the way we live now, at least in a political landscape redrawn (district by district) by folks like Tom DeLay.

A mournful undercurrent runs through “Waterloo,” flowing from the death of an old-school desegregationist congressman and pooling in the person of Bones Lasseter, Nick’s boozy uncle, a glad-handing, profane, hard-balling lobbyist still pining for the 1970s, when Waterloo’s political misfits, left and right alike, “aspired to serious things without taking themselves too seriously.” In Bones’ sage estimation, “there aren’t enough drunks left in politics,” leaving the field wide open for ideologue mannequins like gubernatorial candidate Mark (“Shares Your Values!”) Hardaway, blessed with “electable hair.” Taking in the civil rights movement, historic preservation and dating on the rebound, “Waterloo” is an irresistible survey of a town where all comers are terrified of losing -- and nobody ever wins.

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Music Through the Floor

Stories

Eric Puchner

Scribner: 214 pp., $24

THE America that Eric Puchner portrays in this riveting collection swings between the mordant surrealism of, say, George Saunders and the Wal-Mart realism of Bobbie Ann Mason: There’s a heightened sense here of lives played out as museum-piece curios; ironies are displayed in a kind of narrative vitrine and authenticities are fastidiously curated. But there’s nothing fusty about Puchner’s approach. Rather, he brings an appraising eye to the oddball -- and often hilarious -- goings-on of the upstart children, hormonally adrift teens, feckless teachers and absentee parents that populate these pages, making “Music Through the Floor” a time capsule, at once alien and wholly familiar, of the here and now.

And what a cabinet of curiosities it is, crammed with such outre rites of passage as shampoo enemas, deep-frozen cocker spaniels and botched carjackings. The collection kicks off with “Children of God,” in which a slacker who feels “like Wile E. Coyote when he goes off a cliff” is put in charge of two mentally retarded boys whose exuberant idiosyncrasies seem more like freedoms than handicaps. “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan” takes the form of the scariest homework assignment ever, when a girl, as clueless as she is heartless, hijacks an essay on Yeats to write about stealing her sister’s boyfriend (“he was in love with me on account of my facial beauty”). In “Legends,” the mood turns darker, as a bored couple travels to Mexico and gets mixed up with a pushy expat who turns outright creepy. In this melodious collection, Puchner proves to be uncannily in tune with the heartbreak and absurdity of domestic life.